Friday, November 28, 2014

Two Dead, Two to Go in Ohio

This is the security video capturing the last few seconds of 12 year-old Tamir Rice's life. Note how fast the Cleveland cops shoot him dead. We're talking two seconds or less. This video plainly belies their official story that they told the kid three times to drop the gun. They even had the nerve to circle in red the kid's hand as it supposedly reached for the gun. Maybe his final thought was to hand it to them. He never even had the chance to put his hands up.

Since we've established the child was 12 and that he had just a toy gun, we don't need any further context. The video shows us everything we need to know. The cop shot the child dead 2 seconds or less after they arrived then the craven cunt hid behind the cruiser. This shows the fascist, paranoid mindset of white cops in heavily black communities, the Us vs Them mentality. It also shows how badly these men and women are trained, that they don't take into account the difference between a man and a child or a toy gun and a real gun.

And all because some old white woman thought she saw a gang banger. With no context other than her saying she thought the gun might be a toy, that was good enough for two white cops who went there with premeditated murder on their minds.

Let's keep one other thing in mind: In Ohio, Open Carry is legal and white men openly parade their ordnance with complete impunity. But this is the second case this year of a black male getting gunned down in Ohio for carrying a toy gun (The second being John Crawford III, who looked eerily like my older son and is the same age) because some paranoid white asshole suffering from Angry Black Man syndrome called the cops.

It's open season on black people, always has been and always will be until some radical changes are made (and, no, shooting cops and ramping up their already radical militarizartion is NOT the answer). We saw it during the antebellum era, we saw it during the Civil Rights era, we saw it in Algiers Point in the wake of Katrina and we're seeing it now. And the Ferguson nondecision sets a very, very dangerous precedent for African Americans. Because, as sure as redneck states began passing voter suppression bills in the wake of the SCOTUS' gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this horrendous exoneration of Darren Wilson will tell white cops once and for all, "Yes, it's perfectly permissible to gun down black people in cold blood. Don't worry, we'll find some rationale for it even if we have to manufacture it."